The first post in this series attempted to define the digital humanities by considering some of its values. Today I want to make two points regarding what a digital humanist is and does. First, a digital humanist is not the same thing as a scholar. While the same person may occupy both roles, these roles nevertheless perform distinct tasks. Second, the digital humanist is distinguished by the tool set, and those tools are primarily for the purposes of visualization. So let’s explore these two points in greater detail, and I’ll conclude by looking at one of the many tools you can use in your own introduction to the digital humanities.

Tools, Tools, Tools!

On the last day of our Demystifying the Digital Humanities seminar (May 4, 2013), the organizers drew our attention to something surprising with regards to digital humanities scholarship: it may not be scholarship, at all. Many of those coming to the digital humanities already know how to conduct research, build and organize an archive, and employ “critical thinking” in order to arrive at some conclusions. The final step is often a presentation of these conclusions in the form of a written essay or a book.

Rather than adding data and conclusions in the scholar’s process, the digital humanist multiplies the perspectives and the media. The digital humanist uses tools in order to view and present collected data in the form of a diagram, graph, word cloud, map, tree, or timeline (or whatever you invent). Because a visual image allows us to see the “same” object or data set in a different way, the tool increases the scholar’s range of conclusions. So the scholar must demonstrate significance, but it is the tool that functions as a “bridge” for the sake of achieving that end.

Given the literary scholar’s tendency toward close reading, certainly an abstract diagram of the work(s) will lead to a less insightful reading. But here we are operating as if the tool provides a conclusion, which is the wrong assumption. The tool does not provide conclusions. The tool only allows us to see more at once.

My close reading of a romantic poem might be the most accurate, interesting, or revealing, but if I can see the same information in relation to more texts, across spatial and temporal fields, my tools will make conclusions regarding historical time periods outside my area of specialization. Wrong again! The map or graph only demonstrates correlations, intersections, and divergences. It is then up to the scholar to investigate those areas.

As the historian Mills Kelly says in his contribution to Debates in the Digital Humanities, “instead of an answer, a graph…is a doorway that leads to a room filled with questions, each of which must be answered by the historian [or literary scholar] before he or she knows something worth knowing.”[i] In this sense, the diagram functions like a treasure map that makes the X’s more explicit. And while that map will tell a scholar where to dig, it cannot tell us why the artifacts matter, what they mean, or how they are useful.

If the burden of the conclusion falls on the scholar, the digital humanist has aesthetic and logistic responsibilities. The digital humanist might ask questions like, “What kind of visualization most effectively represents my data?” It will also be important to consider financial issues like cost and maintenance. Often times, visualization software is free. But when depending on others for your tools, there are risks like the issue of ongoing support. If I use an online tool made by a company that suddenly “disappears,” I may have to go shopping. And let’s not forget the attachment people feel for an accustomed piece of equipment. Whatever tool one chooses, the old rule apples: backup your files. If you lose a tool you have only lost the medium through which you represent your information. Lose your information, and—well…

But everything we do comes with risks. To balance your decision as to whether or not you want to use these tools, I suggest having some fun with them first. An easy and fast way to see the benefits yourself is through IBM’s Many Eyes, a website devoted to free visualization software. The disadvantage is that Many Eyes’ visualizations must remain online; on the other hand, the site is so easy to use that you can test the water within minutes.

Below is a screenshot of a word tree I made from the Lyrical Ballads. In order to generate the tree, first I use the browser in the “data sets” to find the Ballads, which someone had already uploaded. Then I click the “visualize” button and select the first diagram option, “word tree.” From here I can enter any word from the Ballads that I want to explore. The 1800 edition begins with an “old grey stone,” so I enter “old,” which catches 47 hits. A diagram appears illustrating all the instances of “old” and how it connects to the words around it. Now imagine doing this with hundreds or thousands of texts. Many Eyes won’t tell you what all those connections mean; rather, it allows you to see them in the first place.

For a closer look at this image, click here.

Rather than “new,” the word that best describes the advantage of digital tools is “more.” A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth does something very similar to my word tree above because the book also supplies all the instances of “old” in Wordsworth’s poetry. But with digital tools, I could add the concordances to Virgil, Spenser, and Milton, as well as those writing manuals, law documents, and political pamphlets. Then all of these texts can be incorporated into the same visualization. In a way, these possibilities make me less nervous about the future of scholarship. Now I can see more ways of lengthening the narratives I was already generating, and find more to explore.

Beyond aiding our own scholarship, the visualization helps communicate what we do as scholars to a broader audience. The thing to remember is that the tool is not a justification in itself and it does not make one’s role as a scholar more relevant. But with these tools we can better demonstrate the power of the media we study to others using a medium held in common across discipline lines. Equally important, by working with these tools, we are in a better position to illustrate the necessity of the scholarship that actually makes these images meaningful.

The Demystifying the Digital Humanities seminar ended last week, but I hope that Paige and Sarah are able to continue these valuable workshops in one form or another in the years to come. For my final post in this series, I will discuss how I have attempted to incorporate the digital humanities into the course I am teaching this term, some of my success, as well as my failures.

The job market is not great right now. We all know it. We don’t always want to think about it. And, since several years pass between the first year of grad school and the last year, it’s very easy to avoid thinking about it: just put your nose to the dissertation grindstone until that last frantic year when you have to look up from your work and look around. The market can change a lot in five, six, seven years as well: when I left undergrad in 2006, it wasn’t horrible. Now… it is, and it seems like grad programs are realizing this and making moves to address it. We are just starting to really assess this issue in my own department, and we’re trying to do this in two related ways: focus on preparations for the academic job market earlier in a student’s career AND accentuate other options that we’re not often taught to consider: alternative academic careers, in other words. In this post, I’d like to describe some of the issues and possible positive practices we discussed in a recent meeting among grad students in my department. I’d also really like to start a dialogue about what other departments are doing to help their graduates prepare for a more positive future after all their hard work.

Alt-ac jobs unjustly get a bad rap: they’re spoken of with low tones, shaken heads, shrugged shoulders. We’re so focused on getting that increasingly unrealistic tenure-track professorship that anything else seems like some kind of failure. And it really, really shouldn’t. Jobs are hard to get in many professions, but variations using the same skill sets don’t seem to be looked down upon as much as they currently are in academia. So, one of the first problems to be fixed is this negative attitude towards jobs that require exactly the types of abilities at which we excel, jobs that would provide financial stability, health care, productivity, and a lot of genuine happiness. Concerns that interfere with considering these options early might include support from the department, committee expectations, discussions (or silences) amongst fellow grad students about such subjects, as well as simple confusion about how to market skills we already have or even how to find alternative career options. All these problems are fixable. My department has taken a first step by putting a recently-hired faculty member in charge to act as a go-to person to help students on an individual basis as they approach graduation as well as to hold various workshops and meetings related to academic and alt-ac job concerns. Overall, we’ve discussed some New School-Year’s Resolutions as we round out the end of our current semester:

Start early. As I said, it’s really easy (and, let’s face it, enjoyable!) to get wrapped up in your research and to forget about where it might lead you after graduation. I, myself, am incredibly guilty of this. Just starting to poke around at what jobs are available from time to time can create awareness (without panic) and can also give you a sense of the timeline for applying to various positions. Start making the most of what you’re doing right now. Have faculty come observe your teaching in preparation for letters of recommendation. Get involved with committees in which you may already have an interest. Use summers to explore short-term alt-ac jobs that might require editing, grant-writing, teaching, etc.  

Know what we have. We have so many skills that would make us fantastic professors. But they’d also make us lots of other fantastic kinds of professionals. We can speak in public and plan lessons and manage groups of people and think on our feet and make information interesting and read large amounts and synthesize and simplify and summarize and analyze and explain and entertain and proofread and edit and a hundred other things. But we don’t always translate what we do into these broader skills. Some of the future workshops we’ve discussed focus on this kind of translation: how to recognize our skills, how to use our writing skills for different types of writing, how to change a C.V. into a résumé, etc.

Speak and listen. Half the problem with both the impending trauma of the job market and the search for alt-ac jobs is that we don’t talk enough about them. We don’t talk about what we think about putting our skills to use in different ways, and we don’t discuss what those different ways might be. What we’ve done, just by having a meeting to discuss the new faculty position and what we’d like it to cover, is to allow ourselves to talk and to listen to one another. This is huge. What’s more, we’re hoping to be able to speak and listen to those outside our current student and faculty population by contacting alumni who have pursued various career options with our same educations. We’ve begun to bring in speakers who can help us think about aspects of professional development and alt-ac careers. We’re planning mock interviews and job talks amongst ourselves, as well as more informal discussions about other aspects of applications.

The job market is a sensitive subject for practically everyone right now, particularly for academics who have invested so much time and energy into a very specific career path. Yet, it’s also a concern near and dear to our hearts as we watch friends and colleagues struggle and prepare for struggles of our own. I am incredibly pleased and proud to be part of these steps to create a space for such an important conversation.  

But, I know we are certainly not alone. I’d really like to open up this discussion to my fellow blog-readers: what steps have your departments taken to think about the job market and alt-ac careers? What have you found useful or frustrating in regards to the leap from graduate student to job seeker? What have you found really helpful in this process?

Helpful resources:

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-alt-ac-track-negotiating-your-alternative-academic-appointment-2/26539

http://www.higheredjobs.com/

http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Academic_Jobs_Wiki

My conference bookends, the first and last panels I attended, were my favorites. We** listened to our first after a harried drive from Chicago, arriving in time to find parking only in the bowels of the giant casino next door, and seating at the front of the Garfield Room—on the floor. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a good experience: not only are you appreciating some very sharp minds, you get to appreciate them from the vantage of a Kindergarten student, crossed-legged on the carpet. ASECS was wonderfully democratic this way. Latecomers got the floor, whether they were fledgling grad students there to be sponges, tenured professors, or professors a giddy month or two or twenty shy of tenure (spirited conversations were had, especially, with the latter). But plenty of generous seat-offering took place as well (fellow-feeling in full swing here!).

So this panel, a roundtable, was titled “Aesthetics and Individuation: Frances Ferguson’s Work in Eighteenth Century Studies,” and the panelists, none of them officially Ferguson’s students, spoke about their indebtedness to her thinking and the incredible influence she has had on the fields of Eighteenth Century and Romantic studies. From her game-changing article “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” on Richardson’s Clarissa (1987) to her book “Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation” (1992), Ferguson has been a force, and other strong voices have met Ferguson with forceful questions and concerns of their own. On this panel, John Bender, Blakey Vermeule, Helen Thompson and Nancy Yousef. Here are some of their thoughts, in condensed Shelley-acorn form:
Bender: Romantic marriage is where function and phantasm meet; realism’s reality is gothic; ecstatic interpenetration.
Vermeule: Ferguson advocates a way to be a self that doesn’t need to mean atomism; what does it mean to want to make an impact in one’s career? pertinent
and, one Hilary Rodham gave the valedictorian speech to Ferguson’s graduating class of 1969 at Wellesley College: “More than social reconstruction we need human reconstruction,” Rodham said.
Thompson: modes of doing and non-doing, what counts as rape? the departure of the volitional; external contents of persons; form as the situated production of inner-ness; Sci Fi and physiological formalism.
Yousef: What relations can be used under the word form? Form preoccupies the room of emotional thinking; Ferguson reminds us that historical materialism and formalism co-exist and cannot cancel each other out.
Finally, my last panel of the weekend: “Close Reading Today,” held in the George Bush room (did not specify Jr. or Sr.)
Sandra Macpherson delivered a paper titled “Close Hearing” and posed some brilliant questions: How do we read the sonic properties of objects? How do we talk about sound as matter without turning it into meaning? I’m still thinking about the independence of sounds in verse being other than, or not necessarily, onomatopoeic. I’m very partial to Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” and Macpherson ended her talk with a clip from the opening of the film. A shot so close that at first you can’t tell what’s happening (a ragged thread being led by a needle in and out of a piece of cloth) but the whole time there is the music, a human symphony singing no words in particular.
Stephanie Insley Hershinow’s “Up Close and Personal” talk began with the question: “Does reading make persons or impersonality?” She went on to consider how close reading has been said to fail and why it is nonetheless a mistake to discount the details: “Close reading is to notice something new, even in a text that has been extensively critiqued.”
Matthew Wickman’s paper, “Reading for the Middle Distance: Moretti and the Picturesque,” made a juicy counterpoint to Hershinow’s. How do we read the images of distant-reading (the bubble trees, line graphs, word clouds etc.)? Numbers: do we really know they mean? Counting, Wickman argued, is a figurative exercise, and if we do not know what numbers are, we don’t know who we are—we don’t know what a ‘whole’ is.
The post-panel discussion ended where I wished it had begun: a man asked a question (or rather, stated at length with no question mark in sight), saying new critical formalism had had its day. Macpherson sung out, “Oh it’s back, baby!”

And with that, back we went to Chicago, heads humming with good things to tangle with and sound out in the months ahead.

*Radiohead’s “Where I end and you begin” is an excellent song for a road trip back to the long (and longer and longer) eighteenth century.
**”We” refers to Samuel Rowe (a second year PhD at the University of Chicago), Allison Turner (a first year PhD at the U of C) and to your blogger, Lauren Schachter (also a first year PhD at U of C). We attended as observers, wisely choosing to do this on our break between Winter and Spring quarters instead of writing our papers.

Library of Congress Reading Room

We’re nearing the end of Spring Semester 2013, which means NASSR 2013 is also near, in August, and NASSR 2014 organizers are already planning away.

The co-organizers of NASSR 2014, Professors Richard C. Sha and Patrick O’Malley, would like our input as to what topics graduate students would like to learn about at this wonderful annual conference for Romanticists. The NASSR 2014 theme is “Romantic Organizations” and it will be held 10-13 July 2014 in Washington, D.C.

Professor Sha tells us “Already, 25 special sessions have been planned with such speakers as Tim Morton, Marjorie Levinson, Tilottama Rajan, Robert Mitchell, Rei Terada, Nora Crook, Julie Carlson, Mark Lussier, Michael Macovski, Orrin Wang, Joel Faflak, Adrianna Craciun, Nick Halmi, Peter Otto, and others.  Co-organizers have invited the NEH to come speak about funding. In addition, The Library of Congress is opening its doors, and will prepare a special exhibit of Romantic items in its collections, including manuscripts of Beethoven, Blake, and from Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.”

Professor Sha’s generous email inquiry asks us to respond with a few ideas for the following questions. This is a wonderful opportunity to suggest our research questions and professionalization interests to conference planners.

1. What topics, related to the conference theme of “Romantic Organizations,” would graduate students most like to see presentations on? In other words: what are we working on that might fit this theme?
2. If we were to have a special session, what topic might it focus on?
3. Do you have requests for our annual Caucus-sponsored roundtable event that focuses on professionalization?

Let’s get this conversation started so that we can give co-organizers our responses promptly. Thanks for your input!

Furlong says, “The familiar rhythm of reading lists, paper submissions, and semester-long deadlines gives way to a more ambiguous challenge—developing an original research project that meets the standards for scholarship in an academic discipline.” Familiar is the perfect word for it: we’ve all been in school for decades… we know what how class works, we know how homework works, we know how writing papers works. I don’t know that I’d call it easy, but we at least know all the dance steps and that, somehow, it all gets done no matter how many all-nighters it takes.

Vick adds, “It is also a time when students have to start answering to themselves more than to their professors and mentors. After comprehensive exams are passed they need to become their own taskmasters and work without, in many cases, external deadlines and demands.” So, suddenly you go from having packed schedules, syllabi, and exam reading schedules to… anything and everything. Or, at least it feels that way. Suddenly, you have years of work ahead of you without a set structure, constructing an argument that could take on a life of its own at any moment. Anything could be useful, so you must read everything. All the books. This leads me to my next point.

A few days ago, I came across a second piece of online writing—this one a blog article on Book Riot— which seemed to speak directly to the title of the article in The Chronicle: “When You Realize You Can’t Read All the Things,” written by Jill Guccini. All the frustration of this title realization comes through as she describes the many situations in which you find yourself acquiring new books… but not actually reading them as they pile up into “mini cityscapes on your floor.” This is especially true for academics in the humanities, for whom reading is both work and play, and getting new books is both extremely pleasurable and sadly stressful. What a crime to leave them, unread, to get dusty and yellowed on the shelf… but I know I am guilty as charged.

Now, bear with me: these two articles are related. When you’re working short term on coursework or exams, you can find some solace in that you only have to keep it up until the deadline comes and goes. We would all study for exams forever if there weren’t a deadline to stop us, and thank god there is. I’m wondering if part of the “getting stuck” Vick and Furlong talk about has to do with the few years of dissertation work begun in the third year feeling like forever and a somewhat narrow field feeling like “all the things.” So, if I’m writing about body parts in Frankenstein, then I have to read the novel and all the critical books and articles on it. Then I should read all about Mary Shelley and the Shelley circle and anyone who influenced that circle and maybe all of Shelley’s other work…and also follow up on this, this, and this footnote. Then, okay, body parts: I should read all the medical discourse when Shelley was writing and maybe what people thought before she was writing and also after she was writing, and maybe some of the current medical discourse on amputation and organ donations, and, why not, maybe some stuff on bodysnatching and army doctors. Now, what about any kind of literary theory: Kristeva and Lacan and Deleuze and Freud and Bakhtin. And theory on the history of the period and of novel form and novel circulation and the two different editions and where it was sold and how much it cost and what kind of paper it was printed on and who bought the first copy. And each article or book as an extensive bibliography that should be gone through with a fine-tooth comb. I’m being a little ridiculous, but see what I mean?

Beginning the dissertation is the ultimate in you-can’t-read-everything frustration because not only do you have a million things you want to read, but there’s the added pressure that you feel you need to read them in order to create something worthwhile. And Vick is right: yes, we’re answerable to our advisors and our committees and to future job applications, but at this point in the game, when all your work is chosen by you and made extremely important because of that, there is an incredible sense of self-worth but also a lot of nervousness in regards to living up to your own expectations. Can you ever read enough to satisfy yourself? The answer (and the point to this whole academic game we play) is no. I think what I’m learning as I’m still in this dangerous third year is that, no, you really can’t read all the things. Somehow that makes me feel a little better.

I would have loved to give better advice in this post rather than just some observations, but I feel too close to the beginning still to assess what is working and what isn’t. I’d like to invite fellow bloggers and readers to respond, though!

What worked for you when you were starting your dissertation that kept you from trying to “read all the things”?

The logical part of my brain knows the exam is a wonderful opportunity to discuss great texts and float ideas. Other people have written wonderful posts about how to prepare for the exam. They encourage having an organized note-taking system and talking about books to everyone. I’m going to focus on how to relax enough in order to accomplish any of that. Here are some tips that I wish someone had drilled into my head during my first few weeks:

Get off of Facebook. There are tons of studies coming out that suggest anyone on Facebook judges themselves based on what other people’s lives appear to be like. We, as English people, can understand that. People edit their lives on social media, and the story can seem more real than the editing. I’ve found Facebook stress becomes more amplified when you spend eight to ten hours a day in a chair and your arms hurt from holding large texts close to your face. Looking at pictures of someone else just being outside, where there is sun, trees, animals, and plants, is suddenly hurtful. You’re inside, you can’t go outside because you should be reading, but you’re not reading; you’re on Facebook, where it seems everyone else is outside or having fun or having fun outside.

Go outside. Go anywhere, really. One of my peers told me about a study that suggested changing physical location helps your brain see things in a new light and increases memory. Sit outside, when you can. Allow yourself to go to coffee shops or the library when the weather won’t let you be outside.

Exercise regularly. When I first started the PhD programs, one of my professors told me to exercise. I remember laughing and asking “When am I going to have time to do that?” He said I should do it anyway. He was right. Of course everyone knows exercise reduces stress. That knowledge didn’t make me do anything. But, scientific explanations about how much exercise reduces stress are motivating. According to studies published in Cell Stem Cell and Molecular Psychiatry, exercises help brain cells grow and that growth increases serotonin. Though these studies focus largely on depression, their conclusion, that Prozac and exercise have similar results on serotonin creation, is a strong endorsement to exercise. (http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/20/its-all-in-the-nerves-how-to-really-treat-depression/) Even short amounts of exercise have been shown to increase cognitive functions. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/regular-exercise-brain-functioning-mental-test-adult_n_2902243.html). So, exercising two or three times a week increases serotonin, stimulates brain cells, strengthens memory, and makes your brain function better. The results validate setting aside a bit of time to move around.

Sleep. I’ve saved the most important for last. Sleeping around eight hours allows you to function. It’s that simple. Even taking short naps will heighten your ability to concentrate. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, 8.4 minutes will heighten cognitive function. Sleep is what allows your brain to transfer short-term to long-term memory, and just one night of poor sleep can result in lower cognitive function. Have a ritual before bed; do the same things at the same time and your brain will shut itself down.

I’ve found doing all of these things makes me work efficiently. Beyond all the wonderful texts I’ve encountered and concerns I’ve crafted, I’ve come to know taking care of myself is not different than preparing for the exam.

To everyone out there preparing for their exam, best of luck! Remember, at some point it’s over.

New York Public Library

This post announces a new Collection of posts that we are building on the NGSC Blog on working in archives and libraries. The Collection strives to create a place where we continue to share our experiences and questions about applying for fellowships and conducting research in libraries or archives that have holdings of interest to Romanticists.

We are working on a way to redesign our front page to feature a few Collections of posts, but for now it’s best to use the Categories drop-down on the right side menu. Look for Libraries & Archives.

Here is what is in our blog’s Libraries and Archives Collection so far:

1. Kelli Jasper has a great introductory post on the early Spring Semester (January through March) as the season for applying for research fellowships to libraries, including the Newberry, the Huntington, and the Beinecke.
2. Michele Speitz wrote a post about her adviser’s recommendations and her time researching at The Huntington Library. The part about this post that sticks with me the most is how to get your writing done while on fellowship reading in an archive. What a great reminder that time does not stop while we’re basking in the aura of primary source material.
3. I’ve written a couple of posts about working in CU Libraries Archives and Special Collections on the Women Poets of the Romantic Period Collection and a little introduction to the Stainforth manuscript. I’m intimately familiar with our collection here at CU, so please send any questions you have my way.
4. Jacob Leveton–our resident Romanticist art historian–posted on how to use the Yale Center for British Art while working with a William Blake manuscript–the sole complete copy of Jerusalem, no less!
5. Jacob also posted on how to use the Art Institute of Chicago Prints and Drawings Department. While it looks like he used his research trip to study George Stubbs’ piece “Horse Frightened by a Lion” (1777) and other works featuring horses, there’s a lot more there.
6. Kelli wrote another post that I will be using to help me navigate researching at the British Library. I am planning to research and “dissertate” there this summer from late May through mid-June.

Forthcoming for this Collection: I am drafting one post on working in the Musées d’Art et D’Histoire and another one on the BGE (Bibliothèque de Génève) in Geneva, Switzerland. Each of those institutions/libraries had their own conveniences and challenges related to research.

Do you have plans to work in a library or archive soon? Maybe a summer research fellowship or a research trip abroad scheduled? Or have you worked in a library or archive that has particularly wonderful materials for Romanticism research that you would like to report on? I’m thinking that perhaps we should write about home institutions as well — they all have a lot to offer that tends to be less visible because right under our noses.

Intro: While they vary greatly by department, language reading exams (or coursework) may seem like imposing milestones to many incoming and continuing doctoral students’ minds. In all cases, however, moving past these requirements as efficiently as possible marks a good point of departure for further work. As someone who began their graduate work not having yet studied either language required of them–but having since passed a French reading exam and begun work on German for reading knowledge–I thought it would be helpful to develop a post detailing how I’ve gone about fulfilling this requirement. Though, I’m equally interested in hearing how other romanticists have worked through language study–particularly those who work both on literature and art of the continent (or elsewhere!).

Don’t Wait / Study Early, Study Often: It goes without saying, but it is helpful to know at least prior to the summer before beginning a program what the language requirements are. In my experience, those few months before starting represent a good opportunity to drill the knowledge necessary to produce a strong working translation of a critical text, as required. Working through flashcards in between reading selected articles is to my mind the most effective way to go about language study. But who wants to do this when there’s compelling and more immediately rewarding coursework to be done?

Devise a Strategy & Stick to It: In June 2010 before starting at Oregon, I picked up a used copy of a standard French for Reading Knowledge textbook. From there, I distilled the salient rules of grammar, syntax, morphology, and basic vocabulary into flashcards–going through one chapter per day, five days per week. This made what seemed to be an insurmountable task much more manageable. I repeated this strategy again when I started at Northwestern this year, and it worked. I’ve also started studying German similarly over the fall and winter terms. However, this isn’t to be didactic. Just to detail what worked for me. Of course, there are myriad ways to go about structuring your own strategy. Experiment, find what works for you, and go from there (and share it in the comments!).

Lean on Previous Language Study: When I was an undergraduate I did Italian and Ancient Greek, knowing I wanted likely to do a Ph.D. at some point, but not knowing that in Art History my language requirements are set. Of course, neither language counted directly towards my doctoral work. In the end, though, each gave me a framework for understanding how Romance and inflected languages work, respectively. I conceptualized learning to read French as re-filling in the frame Italian gave me. I’m doing the same thing now with German and Ancient Greek. The point is, use the structures of previous engagements with languages to move present studies forward.

During the Exam: While everything hinges upon how your language exams are evaluated, some of the best advice I’ve gotten is to avoid attempting to translate directly. Thinking through translation with reference to reading arguments is a good way to structure this. How I personally go about this is to: (1) skim the work, using the sentence structures and vocabulary in order to forge an idea of the text’s trajectory, (2) identify the argument that’s being made, and the premises that support it in the text, and (3) translate from there. Perhaps this is oversimplifying the matter, but, in September, for instance, I wasn’t looking to produce a translation that Mallarmé would approve of. I just wanted to fulfill a requirement, and move on.

It Will All Get Done, Even If It Takes Multiple Attempts: Most students I’ve known require multiple attempts to fulfill language requirements. In addition, continuing to drill flashcards and take language courses can also enrich one’s time in graduate school. This may end up being me with German. Who’s to say. In any event–optimistically stated–language study can be a way to get out of what Blake called “the same dull round,” and crucially engage with a much wider body of materials and scholarship than what would otherwise be possible. A wine-press, indeed–but a necessary one, in fact.

I am extremely happy to introduce the NASSR Graduate Caucus Blog’s new co-editor, Jacob Leveton.

Jacob (B.A., English Literature, Arizona State University: 2010; M.A., Art History, University of Oregon: 2012) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. He has served as a writer for the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus blog since 2011. His historical interests center upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British visual culture, generally, and the visual artist and poet William Blake, specifically—with wider conceptual interests in critical theory, animal studies, and ecocriticism. His current major project orbits around a social-critical engagement with British equestrian portraiture at the beginning of the Romantic period in England, and is concerned with the class struggle and domination of horses as nonhuman animals.

On a more personal note, I think Jacob has been perhaps the most enthusiastic member of and contributor to our blogging group besides myself. I remember when I first met him at the Park City NASSR in 2011 at the NGSC sponsored event on the job market: his excitement and friendliness made a lasting impression. He has already started to apply his positive energy to improvements for our blog and I’m convinced that we will be a great team of co-editors.

Back to work!

- Kirstyn

In this post I want to outline a brief definition of the digital humanities, and I will conclude by suggesting some things that you can do to advance your own understanding. Because these posts stem from my own introduction, they might be too basic for those already immersed in DH studies. Rather than an in-depth exploration, consider this post as an enthusiastic sharing of information.

Defining the Digital Humanities

During the first session of the seminar we attempted to define the digital humanities. A typical strategy towards definition might ask what a concept “is.” But the organizers challenged us to think about what this concept “does” and what “values” it embodies. The next two installments of this series will cover what you can “do” in the digital humanities. Today, I want look at some values.

Collaboration is one of the main values espoused in the digital humanities. “Instead of working on a project alone,” as Lisa Spiro says, “a digital humanist will typically participate as part of a team, learning from others and contributing to an ongoing dialogue.”[i]

In which case, a digital humanist might post his or her most recent progress, research, or problem on a blog or Twitter feed. Others can then add comments, suggestions, and criticisms. There is also a push toward finding people with the resources to do the job you have in mind (knowing he had the skills, I asked my brother to make the image above for this post). Overall, there is a common avowal among digital humanists that works ought to receive input and support from others before reaching the final product, and in addition, this feedback can come from more people from different disciplines.

Making works more available, as Paige and Sarah stressed, also means a greater willingness to be “open,” even with regards to “failure.” By being more open scholars can overcome the erroneous belief that every “success” equals “positive results.” As in the physical sciences, in the humanities there is little sense in reproducing the same bad experiment more than once. Sharing failures might ultimately lead to less repeat, and potentially more success.

It would be impossible to offer a full definition in this short space, but my conclusion so far is that, without knowing it, many young scholars are already invested in the digital humanities. For instance, writing for the NASSR Graduate Student Caucus blog qualifies as a digital humanist platform and method. I am writing in a public domain, making my interests more open for sharing and criticism, taking risks on what kinds of content I post, and focusing on producing more products more consistently, all of which embodies a DH ethos. During the first seminar in October, upon learning that I already shared many digital humanist values, it encouraged me to go familiarize myself with some of the tools, which I will now discuss.

Getting Started in the Digital Humanities

While not every university hosts a seminar like the one I attended, there are some traveling ones. According to the THATCamp homepage, it is “an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.” These camps take place in cities all over the world and anyone can organize one. Or if you want something more intense, try the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria (see Lindsey Eckert’s post on this site for an overview).

If you really want to jump into the digital humanities fast (this might sound self-indulgent in this context), I think the best method is reading blogs. The problem with blogs is the sheer quantity. But once you find a blog that works, they usually provide a blogroll that includes a list of the author(s)’ own preferences. At the bottom of this page I provide three blogs with three different emphases regarding the digital humanities for you to try (and please respond below if you have others to suggest).

The last thing is coding. It seems scary, but with simple (and free) online tutorials, learning how to code is like getting started with any foreign language: the first day is always the easiest. You learn “hello,” “please,” “thank you,” und so weiter. The difficulties arise later. But anyone who has travelled abroad knows that a small handful of phrases can actually satisfy a large range of interactions. For instance, it takes a few minutes only on w3schools.com to learn how to make “headings” in your blog post (like the emboldened titles above). Headings actually allow search engines like Google to more easily recognize your key words and phrases, which I didn’t realize until I started learning a little code. Ultimately, learning how to code can help you appreciate the rules that govern your online experience.

Last, I think it’s important to divulge why I became interested in the digital humanities. Because my dissertation started to focus more on tools, geometry, and the imagination in the eighteenth century, I found myself on the historical end of digital space. It made good sense then to start exploring current trajectories. But as I hope to show in the next two entries, “doing” digital humanities does not necessitate digital humanities “content.” Your introduction might be more about method, pedagogy, or even values. That said, it is worth having a good reason to invest your time in DH studies. As graduate students, time is always in short supply. But if it’s the right conversation for you, be open, be willing to fail, and enjoy the Kool-Aid.

Some Suggested DH Blogs:

If our blog is the only one you are reading with any frequency, perhaps the next place to go is The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker. This blog features a number of authors writing on the latest trends in technology, teaching, and the humanities. For starters, try Adeline Koh’s work on academic publishing.

Ted Underwood teaches eighteenth and nineteenth century literature at the University of Illinois. His blog, The Stone and the Shell, tends to explain DH tools, values, and protocols for “distant reading.”

For a more advanced blog, in terms of tools and issues, I have found Scott Weingart’s the scottbot irregular resourceful, interesting, and it is also a great example of how to up the aesthetic stakes of your own blog.